This Is Why Your Hashtags Aren't Working

Do you want your hashtags to actually work?

The debate goes on wether hashtags are dead or not. Truth is: you can still get a significant amount of extra reach

through your hashtags! Want to know how? read along!

So you gave hashtags a try, but they didn't work out. They must be dead right?

Wrong.

Hashtags have a specific manner in working, they require patience and a strategy. Especially the first one is where most people drop out ;)

If used correctly, you can attract hundreds, even thousands more people to your content. This post specifically talks about hashtags on Instagram.

But how do you achieve that?

The goal is to get your content to rank on a hashtag. This means that when you search for a hashtag, your piece of content wil be shown in the top posts, which will result in a lot of people finding it!

So what's the reason your hashtags aren't working?

Let's dive into it!

You are using hashtags that are too generic

Let's say your account is a business account that posts about your coaching business. You'd want to attract people to your content that might be interested to work with you, right?

By using a hashtag like #coach or even #businesscoach, you're most likely not going to see any results.

The reason for that is that there are about 10.000 other people PER DAY that also post their content using that hashtag.

The competition is too high, you will never 'rank' and you see no results in your hashtags.

2. You don't have a strategy, or don't know how to make one

This is a common mistake and one of the main reasons you don't see any results with your hashtags.

Not knowing what a right strategy is for your hashtags, or how to even make one.

Personally, I like to use a hashtag research tool for this part. My favorite is Flick.Tech. This is a paid all-in-one tool where you can analyze your whole Instagram account as well. But I know you have a lot of free or cheaper ones too, such as IQ Hashtags (to see if your hashtags are banned).

For the sake of this article I will show you the best strategy for when you are or aren't using a hashtag research tool.

~ If you are using one

If you would be using Flick.tech for example, it's very easy.

You type in a keyword and magically all these suggestions will appear!

The beauty of it is that the tool will automatically filter banned hashtags out.

The key here is to use your content pillars and use niche-specific keywords. Try sticking with 3-4 pillars!

Now that you have all these suggestions, you want to select the ones that apply to your account, your content and your niche.

While selecting these, you also want to pay attention to the competition score and the average amount of likes. This shows the amount of likes that a post gets that gets ranked (I'll get back to that).

The competition score is decided by the amount of posts that uses the hashtag on a daily count. Like I mentioned earlier, if the Daily Average Post Count (D.A.P.C. as used by Flick.tech) is about 10.000, the competition is very high.

It's important to balance this out. You want to use these high competition hashtags as well, because if you get ranked on small(er) competition hashtags the chances are that you'll get ranked on the bigger ones as well!

But before that happens, you need to rank on small(er) competition hashtags first.

Ideally, you want to divide your hashtags from really small competition - to really large competition.

And if that wasn't enough, you need to focus on the average likes as well.

Following Flick.tech's own advice, you should use:

10 hashtags that are 30% below your average amount of likes

10 hashtags that are the same as your average amount of likes

10 hashtags that are 30% above your average amount of likes

If you use Flick.tech already, I would suggest to visit their 'Training and Tips' tab for super helpful information on what they call 'the staircase method' and more.

~ If you aren't using one

Not to worry, you don't necessarily need a fancy reseach tool to come up with a suitable hashtag strategy.

These tips are for building the right strategy, although be warned: they might take a little more time.

Firstly you want to use the same pillars like I spoke about before. 3-4 pillars that describe your niche and content.

You need to come up with the hashtags yourself instead of a computer suggesting them for you, so what you can do best to save the most time is this:

For each pillar, come up with about 30 hashtags. Don't search them up yet, but write them down.

If you have them all written down, search for them one by one. the things you want to lay focus on are:

If the are banned (Instagram will show you right away when you click on the hashtag).

When the most recent post was (if it was a few days ago, the hashtag isn't active anymore and you shouldn't use it).

And how many posts have used the hashtag in total.

The total amount of posts per hashtag is what is going to lay the base of our strategy.

Here are some guidelines in which we will divide the hashtags into:

0-50K - very small

50K - 100K small

100K - 500K medium

500K - 1M large

1M+ very large

When you're finished with checking all the hashtags, you want to put them in collections based on the size of the hashtags.

You will have more hashtags than you need for one post, so try switching it up!

And that's it. You now have the perfect hashtag strategy.

Make sure to come back every few weeks to make sure your hashtags are still up to date, and none of them got banned in the meantime.

3. Your hashtags are not relatable to your content

People will not find you on your hashtag #businesscoach if you use it on a post with a picture of the old pair of jeans that you also happen to sell on your Instagram page. Find out if your hashtag relates to the content and make sure to always check what's in the top posts of this hashtag.

Does your piece of content fit into that? Great! This will make the algorithm understand what your post is about and increases your chance of ranking.

Does it not fit in with the top few posts? Then your piece of content will most likely not rank, and you will have to find another, more suitable hashtag.

4. Your engagement is low

For the ones that don't know; your engagement means the likes, comments, saves & shares that a piece of content receives.

The algorithm of Instagram works in quite a simple way (generally):

- You post your piece of content

- You get good engagement

- Instagram pushes your post because of that

- Your post gets shown to more people, therefore you receive more engagement

- So on and so on

Well, here's a little secret.

It works the same with hashtags.

When you receive lots of engagement, your chances of ranking get bigger!

5. You are using bad hashtags

You have seen this phrase before in my artice, under the name 'banned hashtags'.

A bad hashtag is, well you guessed it, a banned hashtag! This, or a flagged hashtag.

But what's the difference?

A hashtag that is flagged is one where Instagram keeps an extra eye on.

For example, #valentinesday is flagged (nope, it's not banned. For now at least) because of it's many daily users. This way they can keep an eye on the content and make sure everyone is following the community guidelines. Using a hashtag that is flagged will not hold you back on reach, although the flagged hashtag could turn into a banned one and in that case you can't use it anymore.

When a hashtag is banned, using the hashtag will limit your reach. The algorithm will not push your content. This means that even if your other hashtags are perfect, your post will not rank on one of them and your content will reach less accounts than you're used to.

Always check if your hashtags aren't banned!

The simpelest way to do that is to either use a good hashtag research tool or another free tool like IQ hashtags.

Recap

Make sure your hashtags aren't too big, but make them specific. This will make sure that the competition on this hashtag is not too high and you actually have a chance of ranking.
Use a strategy for your hashtags. Either use a hashtag research tool or use the strategy that I explained in point 2.
Only use hashtags that relate to your content.
Focus on your engagement first. Hashtags are not a magical tool to save your posts, they are a way to grow your reach on an already thriving post.
NEVER use banned hashtags, it's super simple to check if a hashtag is banned before using it!

And if you do all this right, the only other thing you need is:

Patience *adds a little dancing emoji right here ;)*